Home Learning


One of our big drives over the last eighteen months has been to develop and improve home-school links, and to support that we've tried hard to provide more suggestions, resources and guidance to support home learning. Below you will find a list of school-wide approaches that we use (along with links to all the relevant sites and portals), while further down the page you will find class-specific information, linked to current topics and learning:

"Teachers and other adults have very positive relationships with pupils. As a result pupils work with confidence and commitment."

Ofsted report, 2022

Years 1 and 2
  • Keep on practicing counting whenever and wherever you can - how many cars are there in the street? How many trees in the field? How many trollies in the supermarket, players on the team or stairs on the way to bed? Our focus is on numbers from 10-20 this term, so things that come in groups of this size are ideal for counting practice. 
  • Practice identifying key places on maps - a globe or a big map of the world would be great, but if you haven’t got one of those, Google Maps on a tablet or laptop is just as good (and means you can start to zoom in on some of the places we’ve talked about).
  • Try planting seeds in the garden or a window box and talking about what happens to them. What do we need to do to help them grow? How do plants change as they grow?
  • Throughout the year we are exploring how our environment changes with the seasons. You could build on this at home in lots of ways - exploring the park, making maps or looking for signs of winter (and, later in the term, the start of spring) on the way to and from school. How do different animals change their behaviour as the seasons change? 
  • Practice reciting the days of the week and months of the year in order - saying them is great; learning to spell a few of them would be even better! 
Years 3 and 4
  • Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home. 
  • Our work on grouping animals relies on us having lots of science knowledge, so talk about creatures you see when you’re out and about - what do they eat? Where do they live? What other living things are they similar to? Don’t worry if this involves some ‘let’s Google that when we get home’ - realising that it’s OK not to know everything is a Learning Superhero skill!
  • If you’re looking for an afternoon out, many of our local museums have Anglo-Saxon finds and relics amongst their collections - including Stevenage, Hertford and Ware Museums (all of which are free to enter). Check their websites for more details on visiting.
  • There are more resources to support the teaching of this topic on the BBC Bitesize history site here.
  • You can have a go at coding in Scratch by heading to scratch.mit.edu or downloading the Scratch app. There are loads and loads of tutorials, ideas and examples of other people’s work available on the Scratch site.
  • Start learning times tables facts - in Year 3, 2x, 10x, 5x and then 3x tables would be a great place to start. In Year 4, we're aiming to know all our facts by heart by the end of the year. 
Years 5 and 6
  • All of the maths we’re doing this term is dependent on quick recall of tables facts, so it would be brilliant if you could work on this. Focus on one table at a time and try: 
    • Making-up rhymes to help remember number facts (“4 x 6 is 24, bears growl and lions roar!”) 
    • Looking for numbers in that table in the world around you - on doors, car number plates, in phone numbers or when you’re out shopping. 
    • Writing-out tables with finger paints, chalk or water-on-tarmac, or make them from playdoh. 
    • Chanting, singing, whispering... Say tables out loud together whenever you have the chance.
  • Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home. 
  • All of the computing tasks we’ve worked on in class are available at microbit.org. There are links to the MakeCode editor we’ve been using, loads of ideas in the projects library and lots more info about these clever devices. 
  • You can support our science topic on light by playing around with torches, mirrors and reflection at home - can we use a mirror to see around the corner? Which clothes and materials reflect light best in the dark? How many different sources of light can you find around the house?